NY Man Purchases Lotto Ticket, Gets Quite an Unfortunate Surprise

Nick Lynough figured he would try his luck one of those Wheel of Fortune scratch off tickets. The 22 year-old Elmira, NY man bought the ticket a few weeks back at a Homestead Inn, not expecting anything out of the ordinary. The NY Lotto Wheel of Fortune ticket lists three separate categories that must be scratched off: person, place and thing. However, when Lynough scratched off the spaces, he was greeted with quite an unfortunate surprise.

The ticket read Y-O-U  E-L-M-I-R-A  T-R-A-S-H

Lynough explained the incident to WETM 18 News

Unfortunately it says 'You Elmira trash' on it. I'm a little offended by it for being a local here in Elmira, New York. Well when I looked at it, I thought it was a fake ticket. Most of my friends used to play some of those old fake ticket tricks on me and that's what I first thought it was. Unfortunately it was a loser and...I was offended by it.

Lynough brought the ticket to the county sheriff’s office who first suspected that it may have been tampered with. After an investigating, it was discovered that the ticket was real and coincidentally sold in Elmira.

New York Lottery spokesman Lee Park gave a written statement explaining the seemingly astronomical chances of such a thing

The unfortunate arrangement of words on this individual ticket was completely random, coincidental and – most importantly - unintentional. As soon as the ticket was brought to our attention, we immediately contacted the ticket printing vendor to remove the word “trash” from being a possible result for any future game. we apologize to anyone who was offended by this unfortunate result.

So what are the actual odds of this happening. According to the gaming commission...1 in 900 million. Poor Nick. Poor Elmira, NY.